July 25, 2005
From the desk of Contributor A:Toot
It is bad form to blow your own horn, but our dear Jane left her horn in my hands at just the right time, so I'll blow it for her: as several readers have pointed out in the comments, she was mentioned in John Leo's US News and World Report column this week (August 1st issue):
Today, yet another round of inflated estimates is breaking out, this one on the number of homeless veterans. A UPI story a few months back reported that nearly 300,000 veterans are homeless on any given night. If so, as blogger Megan McArdle pointed out a few weeks ago on Asymmetrical Information, that would mean that every single homeless person in America must have served in the armed forces, since 300,000 is about the total number of the homeless. The 2000 census, covering people living in shelters but not those living on the street, counted only 170,706 homeless people.
Nicely done, JG. One of my favorite things about her is her ability instantly to detect numbers and "facts" that don't pass the sniff test.
Posted by Contributor A at July 25, 2005 5:11 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksI don't disagree with questioning the story, but I do wonder...LA County just did a reasessment of the numbers of homeless wandering LA county streets, and found that previous estimates were low by a lot...I think the number that was bandied about here was that there were almost 50,000 more homeless persons than previously accounted for. Couldn't that indicate an essential miscount in the way we account for homeless persons? However, I doubt that 300K vets are on the streets on any given night. That number seems like it is off by a factor of 10 or so.
It pays to read your comments and trackbacks :-)
Jane rocks!
This just illustrates how useless most of the homeless surverys are. In most cases, there isn't even agreement over the definition of homeless, let alone the number.
Kinda' like how whenever there is a spate of bad weather, be it heat waves or winter storms, all manner of deaths are attributed to the weather, as if nobody would've died if it was 65 degrees and sunny.
Yeah, flaime. I have to question that 300,000 number of total homeless, too. Seems awfully low to me.
Low in comparison to what, wallster? Actual homeless persons you have personally surveyed, or just your general observations of panhandling street transients, not all of which are homeless?
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